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Last month I was pleased to attend the BSIMM Europe Open Forum. BSIMM is a model for assessing software security activities within an organisation; I have been following it since its first release in 2009, and over the last several months I’ve been able to use it in earnest at Visa Europe.

For me, the most interesting discussion at the forum was on presenting BSIMM assessment results in a visually compelling way. The BSIMM document uses spider charts, which hide potentially valuable information about activities at lower maturity levels. Sammy Migues presented a format he uses at Cigital, called “equalizer diagrams”, which reveal that information but lack the comparison with a benchmark.

I decided to ask Louise (the other half of Franklin Heath) about this, as data visualisation is one of her principal skills. We’ve come up with something I like to call a “DIP switch diagram”, which I will explain in this post. Read the rest of this entry »

…The madness being a visualisation of Open University module results between 2007 and 2011.

For the last 18 months, I have been studying for a degree with the Open University. I’ve successfully completed the equivalent of the first year of full-time study – composed of 120 Level One points, split over modules in both Business and IT. The result of this is that I now have letters after my name – Cert Computing and IT, and Cert Bus Stud. (I especially like the latter). I am now studying two second Level modules in programming. And like many students, I am easily distracted by displacement activities.

Last week, someone posted a breakdown of 2011 results to one of the OU Facebook groups. This document contained percentage breakdowns of results by module codes, and straightaway some numbers caught my eye. For instance, why did only 29.9% of students complete module B190?

Curious, I loaded this pdf document into an excel spreadsheet to muck about with it some more. I quickly realised I needed some more context around this information. What was module B190? What level was it? How many credits did it provide?Read the rest of this entry »